History

For over 25 Years, We Champion Grassroots Women Around the World

In 1995, the Huairou Commission began in a tent for grassroots women leaders working relentlessly at the 4th World Women’s Conference in Beijing to advance their inclusion in global development processes joined together around a common goal. 

At the outset of the Beijing Conference, GROOTS International – a global network of grassroots women organizations – and the USA based National Congress of Neighborhood Women came together to ensure that the issues facing grassroots women were finally addressed in the global women’s rights agenda. At the time, there was little space for civil society, especially the poor urban and rural women’s groups, to participate at the High Level Conference, and the grassroots women leaders organizing was especially underfunded. Without the representation of grassroots women, the daily issues confronting poor communities, such as access to food, livelihoods, water and sanitation, were not being prioritized.

The gap of lacking poor women’s voices in the feminist movement was recognized by the UNIFEM, who emerged supportive of grassroots women’s inclusion, and have awarded GROOTS International with funding to ensure participation of grassroots women’s organizations in the Beijing Platform for Action.

GROOTS International and the National Congress of Neighborhood Women hosted multiple regional meetings of grassroots women to consolidate their agenda going into the 4th World Conference on Women. They launched a 50/50 campaign, where each professional woman going to Beijing was encouraged to sponsor a grassroots woman leader to go come along. Meanwhile, the Mothers Centers of Germany mobilized hundreds of women to create a patchwork quilt as a symbol of all the grassroots women coming together.

In the village of Huairou, an hour outside of Beijing, GROOTS International together with the National Congress of Neighborhood Women organized a Grassroots Tent for grassroots women’s organizations to gather, learn, and share ideas, strategies and experiences to take home to their communities. Every day women’s groups from different countries and regions hosted caucuses, which became a tool to collectively organize and to uncover that cross-cutting issues, such as land and housing, were transnational links of solidarity among the grassroots women’s groups. The tent gathering brought grassroots women together to amplify their voices and messages grounded in lived experience and on-the-ground expertise across the women’s movement and the UN.

“It was in this coming together that the global women’s movement really grew up. Finally, women went from fighting with each other and fearing each other’s’ narratives and agendas to coming together to working collectively as one.” 

– Jan Peterson, co-founder and Honorary Chair of the Governing Council

Credits: Part 1 of the film We Are The Leaders directed by Lyn Pyle.

Impressed by the organizing of grassroots women and their partners, Wally N’Dow, then Executive Director of the UN Commission on Human Settlements, “commissioned” fifty women leaders to monitor the Habitat II conference, naming the group the Huairou Commission. For the first time, an organized group of women had a central role to play in the human settlements arena and capitalized on the opportunity to demonstrate the political power of locally connected grassroots women’s groups coming together at the global level.

Over the years, the Huairou Commission has evolved from an advisory body to Habitat II into a global movement for grassroots women’s empowerment in development. With the secretariat located in the Neighborhood Women’s House hosted by the National Congress of Neighborhood Women in Brooklyn, New York City, the Huairou Commission reaches grassroots women organizations in 45 countries.   

Huairou’s Unique Perspective

We seek for a paradigm shift in how development policies are created and implemented, supporting grassroots groups not as victims or projects, but as agents of change and active development partners. The Huairou Commission has grown into a global grassroots women’s network championing this fundamental shift.

We believe that grassroots women’s voices must be heard and the women must speak for themselves in development circles. The movement embraces a bottom up organizing approach informed by grassroots women’s knowledge and experiences of development realities in their communities, illustrated by community risk assessments executed by women themselves. Grassroots women are supported in their leadership through systems of mentorship, and on-going peer-learning across the network.

Jan Peterson, Sandy Schilen and Lana Finikin on the history of the Huairou Commission and building global grassroots women’s movement

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Part 1: Building Grassroots Tent: global organizing leading to the 4th World Conference on Women

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Part 2: Claiming Space: defining grassroots women’s movement

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Part 3: Looking 5 Years Ahead

Claiming Space in the Development Policy

The Huairou Commission organizes using the social movement strategy of building local to regional to global networks and alliances to advance the movement’s goals. This organizing logic enabled Huairou members to claim space as a partnership entity in the feminist movement and in the development circles.

Since the inception, we have united grassroots women’s organizations and their allies to uncover the shared experience of common development issues in grassroots communities that led to building thematic networks for advocacy and peer learning. We facilitated grassroots women networking around issues of land and housing through Women’s Land Link Africa, care-giving and HIV/AIDS through Home Based Care Alliance, resilience through Community Practitioners Platform for Resilience, or safety through Safer Cities, that enable for the grassroots women to engage in cross-cultural, borders transcending dialogues exchanging knowledge and best practices in community development.

Huairou Commission’s network building approach has evolved from uniting across thematic campaigns to consolidating local, national, regional and global networks that employ bottom-up organizing tools and put grassroots women at the center of decision-making and partnership dialogues.

Tools like Peer Exchanges and the Local to Local Dialogues alongside the Community Practitioners Platform for Resilience facilitate local level network organizing to unite voices. National Assemblies on Localizing Agenda 2030 facilitate national level grassroots policy and partnership campaigns. Huairou members form Regional Committees and host regular Regional meetings to take stock of regional membership networks, and to plan for regional policy and partnership priorities. Globally, the member elected Governing Council hosts an annual membership meeting to take stock of the movement and revise strategic priorities for partnerships, policy and on-the-ground activities. Our Community Practitioners Platform for Resilience members meet at Global Brain Trusts regularly to evaluate the Community Resilience Funds campaign.

Organized at the local, national, regional and global dimensions, we facilitaterecognition of grassroots women as important development partners, claiming more power in the development arena. Since 2005, the Huairou Commission has held ECOSOC status with the United Nations, which grants grassroots women on-going presence in the UN policy spaces.

Partnerships & Impact

Throughout its history the Huairou Commission has fostered grassroots women’s empowerment and leadership in order to put their voices and knowledge at the center of development processes. In this regard, we have built a large scale movement of grassroots women leaders and their allies. Working with partners and allies, we have championed redefining meaningful partnerships with communities in development, and we worked to make grassroots women’s voices heard and institutionalized in development decision-making.

In 1996, we brought over a 100 grassroots women leaders and allies to the Habitat II conference and lobbied for 136 references to women and gender in the Habitat II Agenda; 20 years later grassroots women were invited to serve as experts in drafting the New Urban Agenda (Habitat III).

Our relationship with the UN Habitat remained strong with our leaders now members of the UN Habitat Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI). We have also claimed advisory roles for grassroots women and their allies with the UN Women, UN DRR, World Bank, UNDP, UN DESA, FAO, and the International Land Coalition.

A 2019 membership survey highlighted that belonging to the Huairou Commission had positive effects on increasing our members’ political influence and participation locally and nationally. This is illustrated in significant increases in their participation in advisory bodies, Memorandums of Agreement with government institutions, and access to decision making spaces.

The Huairou Commission evolved from a coalition of founding networks to a bottom-up grassroots women led organization. In 2018, the Commission hosted its first Global Grassroots Women’s Congress, where Huairou membership elected the Governing Council from among its advanced members with grassroots women comprising ⅔ of the Council.

Our role in women’s movement has also matured and Huairou Commission has been selected by the UN Women to become a Global Leader of the Generation Equality Action Coalition – a multi-stakeholder coalition bringing governments, philanthropy representatives, inter-governmental organizations and select few civil society organizations to accelerate gender equality. Grassroots women leaders will join forces with governments of Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Spain and Sweden, OECD, Melinda and Bill Gates foundation, and the UN Capital Development Fund to champion Economic Justice and Rights.

With this kind of progress over the last 25 years we are looking forward to expanding our reach in representing grassroots women to be at the center of sustainable development.